Rediscovering the Achaemenid Empire

Because of the internet, Locke argues, everyone is free to communicate, and information is ubiquitous, fast-moving and dangerous. Corporations of the future have to understand the value of this gossip, and profit from their workers trading it. The secretive, pyramid-structured businesses of old will come to look more like a “utopia” of intermingling communities abiding by the maxim that “all markets are conversations”. In this process, the revolutionary tool is not samizdat or the petrol bomb, but e-mail – and the Jerusalem he hopes to build is rather like a series of email-chattering Tupperware parties.